Historian Don Critchlow's insightful look at the horrific regimes of five 20th century "revolutionary monsters" is the rare non-fiction work that readers will find difficult to put down. While most Americans are familiar with the names of Lenin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, and Khomeini, this book provides an in-depth and detailed study of their backgrounds, motivations, and the reign of terror each fomented.

The timing of Critchlow's new book could not be more fitting. American society in recent years has become increasingly polarized, with roughly half the population committed to preserving our democratic republic while the other half pushes for a socialist "utopia" that would destroy America's traditional underpinnings and way of life.

The book's introduction notes that many of today's young people "are infatuated with revolution, but for those who fled Communist dictatorships, revolution is a serious matter." Critchlow writes: "Mass murder within these revolutionary regimes was not a coincidence. Terror is instrumental to the modern revolutionary–mass murder follows without apology."

While an accusatory finger can justifiably be pointed at the schools, which have avoided adequately teaching students about history and the failure of socialist regimes, books like Revolutionary Monsters bring home the stark reality. Even for older readers familiar with the horrors of 20th-century Communism, Critchlow provides little-known details and context.

As may be expected, the most riveting sections are those on Lenin and Mao. Critchlow writes that "Lenin's legacy to his country was one-party rule, a police state, a failed economy, and Joseph Stalin." The same pattern (except for Stalin) is repeated with each of Critchlow's five "monsters."

Another commonality is "the cult of personality" that was built up around each of these totalitarian rulers. For example: "Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed throughout the country describing Lenin as the ‘apostle of world communism' and ‘the invincible messenger of peace, crowned with the thorns of slander.'"

The author explains that while "the Anglo-American tradition of limited government, unalienable rights, and the rule of law" were all held together "by a fundamentally Christian view that humans are naturally imperfectible," communists, on the contrary, "thought that man's perfectibility had essentially no limits." He chronicles that although Lenin and Trotsky believed the Russian Revolution would soon spur "a working-class upheaval across Europe," Stalin took the more realistic view that world revolution "had to be consolidated in Russia and then promoted through subversion." The author shows how true Stalin's observation turned out to be: Russian support and influence provided the fodder for communist takeovers in China, Cuba, Africa, and in part, Iran.

Critchlow shows how the totalitarian regimes he describes all came about as a result of discontent among the governed with the less-than-perfect rulers who preceded them. In Russia, Czar Nicholas II abdicated amidst horrible military losses in the first World War, widespread worker strikes, and general civil unrest. A similar situation existed in China before Mao's rise to power. While Chiang Kai-shek was himself a good man, many under his command were not, and the complexity of Chinese factionalism, the Russian Bolshevik influence, and the Japanese invasion of China prior to World War II among other factors, all served to ultimately derail Chiang's leadership.

The section on Mao Zedong alone is worth the price of this book. Critchlow writes that in the 27 years of Mao's rule, "he held absolute power, governing over a quarter of the world's population," and that "his tenure was catastrophic." The extent of Mao's narcissism and cruelty is truly breathtaking. Mao's leadership led to the deaths of at least 42.5 million Chinese people from "famine and violence," more lives than were lost even in Soviet Russia through Lenin and Stalin's purges and their infamous gulag prison system.

Two additional commonalities among the five revolutionaries are their banishment of Christianity, and the fact that each was assisted by leftist sympathizers in the west, particularly journalists who painted sympathetic portraits of them. For example, the American journalist Edgar Snow was deliberately cultivated by Mao's comrades, who showed him "security, secrecy, warmth, and red carpet." These comrades were instructed to "read everything Snow wrote," and they amended and rewrote parts of Snow's book, Red Star Over China. The book turned out to be a whitewashed account of the murderous and tyrannical rule of Mao, presenting the Chinese Communist Party as "an agrarian reform movement intent on bringing betterment to the peasants while downplaying [its] Moscow connections." It became a reference on the Mao regime for years.

A similar situation occurred during Castro's rise to power. Castro slyly arranged for a contact to reach out to New York Times reporter, Herbert Matthews, who was vacationing in Cuba in 1957, while Castro was preparing his Communist takeover from the corrupt and increasingly unpopular rule of General Fulgencio Batista. Critchlow describes how Castro "easily beguiled Matthews," using a deliberately staged command post, located in the jungles of Cuba's Sierras, where Castro pretended to preside over a bustling installation.

The end result was "a series of three long articles" beginning on February 24, 1957 wherein Matthews described Castro as "having a political mind, not a military one, with strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, and the need to restore the constitution and to hold elections." Castro told Matthews he harbored no animosity towards the United States or its people, which couldn't have been further from the truth. He claimed: "Above all, we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship." To illustrate how blatant this lie was, when Castro died at the age of 90 in 2016, Cuba still had not experienced a free election.

All five revolutionaries described by Critchlow were intelligent, albeit in differing ways, with backgrounds that included higher education. Despite their collective insistence that they were champions of the working class, none was born in poverty. In each of their countries, the population was better off before they seized power than after they assumed control. In Robert Mugabe's Rhodesia, for example, despite the heavy-handed colonial government, the people had enough to eat, and the country was considered the "breadbasket of Africa" with its rich agricultural lands.

Amid promises of freedom and prosperity, each man instead caused untold suffering among his people from hunger, lack of basic necessities, and constant fear of torture and death. In the case of Iran, Khomeini's vision was one of a mystic belief that a mortal man such as himself could become one with God through piety. In this way, he differed from his fellow tyrants. However, the end result was the same for the Iranian people. As Critchlow summarizes: "Khomeini created a regime with a messianic mission that vied with the dreams of former Communist leaders. Lenin, Mao, and Castro believed in the eventual utopia for the proletariat. They believed in the creation of the New Socialist Man. Mugabe envisioned a pan-African utopia. Khomeini's vision was grander: a final apocalypse with the death of all infidels."

Although the utopian promise was proven false again and again in the 20th century alone, with all its wars, bloodshed, suffering, and death, Critchlow notes that "dreams of revolution persist" and lessons of the past are denied or ignored. "Is history to repeat itself?"

The Education Reporter Book Review is a project of America’s Future, Inc. To find out more about America’s Future, visit AmericasFuture.net.

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